[b]Chen![/b]

"Is this yours?" said a voice - we will call them 'he' because that is how they feel today. He has a suit, he has a sword, he has a grin and those are all one truly needs to accomplish mischief. It is the driver of the little car and how did he get back here? Hadn't he gone on ahead?

"This pretty little thing?" said the Technomancer, hand on her own sword. "No. Can't say that it is."

"Can't tell if I'm lucky," said the thief, still ready with that tension. "Or unlucky."

"It's hers," said the Technomancer with a gesture at Rose. "Wouldn't want to fight that. Wouldn't want to fight any of the others that'll come after her."

"That's fine," said the thief, stepping cautiously close and lifting up Chen with the hand that wasn't on the hilt of that sword. He tosses her over one shoulder. "I've got a buyer close by."

"The fox?" said the Technomancer. "You're a bold one."

"Speaking of buyers, you for sale?" he said. "I can put in a good word with the fox if you can slow the Ancient down a little."

"I'll take cash, if it's all the same to you."

"It's a deal," the thief tossed a thick wallet on the ground. The two exchanged one more glance, full of tension that could have broken into violence or passion - as any confrontation between sword bearers always could. But then they glanced aside and he stole you, Chen, away - running low through the ditch beside the road to toss you, still trussed and gagged, in the back seat of his car.

[b]Rose![/b]

The confrontation looms larger. The falling god faces you with eyes that had picked the monkey king from amidst a crowd, with a spear that itched to carve the calligraphy of martial perfection. Oh, doesn't he crave it? Aren't his desires the same as yours? Distractions and duels and precious victory and indulgent defeat?

But then he abruptly bows. He offers you the nails. And then he turns and strides magnificently back to the little car and crams his bulk inside, and it speeds off down the dirt road, bumping all the way along. It happens so fast and so decisive that you're left stunned, unsatisfied, burning at that anticlimax - that shove from a violent embrace that seemed so immanent for a second there.

It takes a long moment to unpack how he transitioned away from it so seamlessly. He was feeling the craving too but he did not have to apply willpower to tear himself away from the challenge. He did not have to swallow his pride. The only way he might have been able to do that is if he was vastly more advanced in the Way than you were... or...

If he'd just won a different way.

Where was your Chen?

[b]Yue![/b]

Whoever had made this place had not feared the water. The entire place is built around it. The walls are meant to glisten in eternal waterfalls and the floor is meant to open up into great pools and fountains. The floors were scattered with crystal flowers meant to catch sunlight falling through thick yellowed marble slats in the walls. A tree grows in the centre of it all with the ancient character of a bonsai, each root placed like a ribbon, each leaf like a blade of glass. This was not a place that feared anything.

It should have. The flows have run brackish and stagnant. The pools bubble with mud and rot and pollution. Robots sit dead and rusted waist deep in water, robots swim living and pointless beneath it. Toys and shopping carts and endless cans and the snapping pincers of crabs that lived within those cans. One entire wall has been decorated with a painting advertising personal injury insurance, but the machine that made this work did not have access to the colour green and so the painting sits garish and half-finished. Its mechanical creator slumps without power in front of its unfinished graffiti. 

Of course the ghost would be mad at this. Anyone who had to live here would be disgusted. And while there is silence here there is not stillness. The entire room is filled with hunger - not wishes, not yearning, just hunger. Hunger enough to wake the dead.

And wake they do.

Three ancient machines, corroded and covered in algae and slime, wrench themselves to their feet - perhaps one intact machine between them. Two of them have clubs, heavy and brutal, and the third has a fist that isn't much better. They shuffle towards you and though they are slow, oh, how you wished they were slower!